Axis History Forum

This is an apolitical forum for discussions on the Axis nations and related topics hosted by Marcus Wendel's Axis History Factbook in cooperation with Christian Ankerstjerne’s Panzerworld and Christoph Awender's WW2 day by day.
Founded in 1999.

Qvist wrote:No, they did not pump out more armaments than the Germans, the overall volume of German armaments production was significantly larger, as was the overall size of the German economy. It was also a lot more diverse, which is why you get greatly superior Soviet output figures in the limited range of items they focussed on.

I'm not sure what you are talking about. The Soviets consistently produced more tanks, airplanes, and artillery pieces than the Germans did in 1942-44.

Yes, but armaments production is not equivalent to just tanks, airplanes and artillery pieces. They also produced a lot less of items like ammunition, naval vessels and trucks, which were major components of the German armaments production.

Do we have any stats on that, or any way to measure the overall "volume" produced?

CJK1990 wrote:The Red Army started the war with less than 3 million men in their operational fronts and ended 1944 with roughly 6 million. In between, they suffered roughly 27 million casualties, which means that during that period they added some 30 million men to their forces - including, of course, returning wounded and sick.

Is it from Krivosheev? According to his tables by the end of 1944 Soviet Army and Navy lost some 25,6 millions men to all reasons, including 22,3 millions as combat losses.

The Germans began the campaign with roughly the same number of men, and at the end of 1944 fielded roughly 2 million men. In the interval they had, what, 5-6 million casualties, hence added something in the vicinity of 5 million men over that period.

I add my voice to those asking of the source of this number. As far as I know Abgänge on the Eastern Front from December 1941 to May 1944 inclusively (total 30 months) were some some 4,8 millions men (160 thousands per months). I don't have number for June-November 1941 and June-December 1944 by but using the same proportion as calculated above we can arrive to a rough estimate equal to 6,9 millions. That is already more than your estimate, and as you know Abgänge were not all losses but only a part of them. Moreover in addition to the field army the Germany had the forces of LW and KM on the Eastern Front, which must suffer some losses and receive some replacements of men. Or we can take it other way: according to the WFST OKW summary by the end of 1944 combat losses of German Army, Air Force and Navy on the Eastern Front (20 Geb.Army included) were some 5,9 millions which is close to the upper limit of your estimate. And there were also noncombat losses which must add a considerable number to this according to what your said in other threads. It seems to me that you operate with entities which are not strictly defined and as a result compare non-equivalent values.

The problem being this number of 3 million casualties is more than dubious. OKW reports - on which you base - seems to have the lowest casualty numbers out of all reporting channels.

How comes that Armies almost always reported their own losses as higher than OKW reported their losses?

You also claim that these 3 million casualties already include sick - which is completely not true.

Remember also that some of the wounded return to duty. Some of them even more than once.

Another thing is that apart from casualties you would have to include also discharged from service for other reasons (for example being too old) to your count to receive accurate numbers of real manpower changes.

BTW - what did Overmans write about number of war invalids in Germany after WW2?

This number of war invalids indicates that there were much more wounded. Also comparing post-WW2 Krivosheev's data to WW2 OKW data is wrong because these figures have different nature. Krivosheev presents already - at least partially - verified (and in most cases this verification increased numbers) data. OKW - not.

And I'd like to know what exactly does your number of 27 million Soviet casualties include.

Because if it includes also for example POWs who were recaptured during the war, it would be another thing which makes your estimation as unreliable, considering that most of them probably returned to service.

I am sorry, but this just betrays total confusion. Obviously I have taken too much for granted when attempting to explain this.

1. Where on earth do you find a figure of 3 million German casualties? I have not given such a figure anywhere. On the contrary, I gave a rough figure for the purposes of making a specific point which required little precision of 5-6 million.2. What makes you think I am basing myself on "OKW losses", whatever that is supposed to refer to? 3. I have explicitly stated that I am talking of force addition including returning sick and wounded. Didn't you notice, or? 4. I don't claim that 3 million casualties include sick, as I am nowhere speaking of 3 million casualties.

I thought it was perfectly clear that the German figure I'm quoting is simply an off-the-top-of-my-head figure. I do pride myself on a sufficient familiarity with German casualty data in the east to be able to do that with some basic accuracy - and as I clearly stated, you can well add a few million without that affecting the validity of the point made. We can make it 8 million if that makes you happy. The margin of validity for the point is simply so large that no great precision is required.

The logic of the basic argument is in fact very simple, and if you want to persist in rejecting it I would appreciate an argument explaining exactly where the problem with it lies. I trust I do not once more have to draw your attention to the distinction between reliability of the data and the validity of the model employing them?

A given force increases its strength from 2 million to 2.5 million over a six-month period, according to the same definition of strength. During that period, it suffers a loss of 500,000 casualties, according to a definition of casualties that includes all men leaving the roll strength of the formations of that force due to being killed, missing or evacuated as sick or wounded.

Can you demonstrate any conceivable set of circumstances in which that does not mean that the net force addition to that force is 1 million men - including all men sent to it as replacements and in new units (and, strictly speaking, having compensated for men leaving the force for any other reason than being casualties, which you would have to conceive of as "force exchange" if you will)? A net total of 1 million actual men will have had to have travelled to and arrived in that force over the course of the period in order to produce that outcome, provided the strength and casualty data are correct.

You can't, because the definition of force addition is all-encompassing (or at least, as encompassing as the strength definition).

And if your estimate is right then German effort on the main front compared to overall effort was surprisingly tiny.

Again, really? How is that? I don't think they're surprising at all. The overall magnitude of German losses in the East has long been established with no very great uncertainty, and since German strength in the East decreased, the net force addition in the east was neccessarily lower than the losses. We have figures for call-ups to the Wehrmacht that are well below 2 million per year from 1941 onwards. We have more than adequate data for the overall strength development and manpower addition to the Field Army, which somewhat exceeded the losses. All of these are entirely consistent with a German force addition in the East of that general magnitude. Do you have any data that suggests otherwise?

Do you understand the meaning of the word "definition" here? We are talking of how concepts relate to each other, not to how they are sourced.

Do you consider these numbers (3 and 27) comparable to each other? Then exactly what do they include?

'

Again, I have no idea from where you have managed to pick up the absurd idea that I am arguing the Germans had 3 million casualties. 27 million is, if I remember correctly, Krivosheev's total if you subtract 1945.

BTW - are there no documents devoted directly to manpower flow that you have to rely on estimates?

What, you mean documents handily listing the total number of men who went specifically to the Eastern front as replacements, returning convalescents, individual transfers or members of units? No, there isn't. If there were, they would give the same result since they would have needed to be calculated in pretty much exactly the same way and using the same data. Because you know, there wasn't a giant turnstile on the polish border counting everyone who went either way, and "force addition to the east" in this sense was not in fact something with which the German reporting system concerned itself.

And, this is not a question of estimates versus hard and solid information. It is a question of the analytical use of that hard and solid information. I've been dealing in rough figures because that's all the relatively self-evident point involved requires (and because there's a limit to the time I'm prepared to spend on this) - but it could easily be done in a much more precise and fully sourced fashion. This way of calculating force addition is not just simple and convenient, it can also relatively easily be sourced in a reliable way and above all, it is analytically great because it makes exactly the right kind of distinctions. If you want to assess force addition to the east, it makes no difference whatsoever if a soldier sent to the eastern front was a newly called-up recruit, a returning convalescent or transferred from another front. It also makes no difference if he was killed, wounded and sent to Germany, demobilised to industry or transferred to Italy. What matters is the number of men arriving to the field formations in the east, and the number of men departing from them. There are of course additionally countless other issues pertinent in different ways about which this method cannot tell us anything.

CJK1990 wrote:The Red Army started the war with less than 3 million men in their operational fronts and ended 1944 with roughly 6 million. In between, they suffered roughly 27 million casualties, which means that during that period they added some 30 million men to their forces - including, of course, returning wounded and sick.

Is it from Krivosheev? According to his tables by the end of 1944 Soviet Army and Navy lost some 25,3 millions men to all reasons, including 22,1 millions as combat losses.

The Germans began the campaign with roughly the same number of men, and at the end of 1944 fielded roughly 2 million men. In the interval they had, what, 5-6 million casualties, hence added something in the vicinity of 5 million men over that period.

I add my voice to those asking of the source of this number. As far as I know Abgänge on the Eastern Front from December 1941 to May 1944 inclusively (total 30 months) were some some 4,8 millions men (160 thousands per months). I don't have number for June-November 1941 and June-December 1944 by but using the same proportion as calculated above we can arrive to a rough estimate equal to 6,9 millions. That is already more than your estimate, and as you know Abgänge were not all losses but only a part of them. Moreover in addition to the field army the Germany had the forces of LW and KM on the Eastern Front, which must suffer some losses and receive some replacements of men. Or we can take it other way: according to the WFST OKW summary by the end of 1944 combat losses of German Army, Air Force and Navy on the Eastern Front (20 Geb.Army included) were some 5,9 millions which is close to the upper limit of your estimate. And there were also noncombat losses which must add a considerable number to this according to what your said in other threads. It seems to me that you operate with entities which are not strictly defined and as a result compare non-equivalent values.

The fetish of accuracy. The point in question does not require much accuracy, nor another endless discussion of how to define German losses. You can add a few milllion to my rough estimate, and it does not matter. What I did was quickly tally the combat losses in my head and then add a bit. If you want to do it properly, Abgänge is of course the way to do it. The KM and LW personnell losses are inconsequential in this context, and in any case personnell strength is a pretty irrelevant measure of their contribution to German combat power. So, feel free to adjust my estimate to 7 million, or 8 for that matter - it has no effect whatsoever on the point made. Lest it's forgotten, that point was that Soviet force addition to the Eastern Front was much larger than the German. I don't mind pertinent objections, but it would be nice if it was possible to discuss valid points without neccessarily getting bogged down in technicalities with no essential bearing on the point made - particularly when the point is clearly made with no pretension to more than approximate accuracy (and requires no more).

Sure I've derived it from the casualty data, and there is no problem with doing so, it is a perfectly valid method for assessing the overall magnitude of manpower addition. If you have 2 million men at point a), suffer 3 million casualties and end up with 4 million men at point b) subsequently, then you have neccessarily somehow added roughly five million men, including returning sick and wounded.

Ah, this will be where you have the idea of 3 million German casualties from. This is just a hypothetical example to explain the logic of the model! As you will note, I give a different and much higher figure further up. But it's not hard to see how this paragraph can be misread in isolation, sorry for not making it clearer.

Correct conclusions require correct argumentation. The point is that if you take, for example, the year 1943 and calculate replacements either as personnel arriving from the rear (German Erzatsheer or Soviet military districts) to the front area or personnel arriving to units from all sources, than in both cases the Soviet figure would be higher, but the ratio would not be 10:1 or 5:1, as might appear from your statements but something between 3:1 and 2:1. Which is close to the ratio of men mobilized during the war (or at least closer than 10:1), and this partly undermines the statement that the last ratio is unrepresentative. They year 1941 is a different story, to a large degree because the Soviet armed forces unlike German were not mobilized when the war started. And it wasn't any advantage, and what the greatest possible disadvantage. Let's take, for illustration, two sides: A and B. Side A has 2 men by the start of the war, side B - 1 men. During the year A additionally receives 0 men, side B - 1 men. If we look at this situation from the point of view of force addition that you favor so much, than it might appear that B has innumerable advantage. Simple common sense says otherwise: A deploys all its resources in a concentrated manner, while B commits its in packets. That just shows that excessive fetishization as you put it of one parameter could be in some way harmful.

I couldn't agree more. And by all means, I welcome the opportunity to refine the argument. My comment about the "fetish of accuracy" however referred to the fact that the level of accuracy required depends on the point made. It is not automatically a valid argument against the argumentation that figures are given with very broad margins.

The point is that if you take, for example, the year 1943 and calculate replacements either as personnel arriving from the rear (German Erzatsheer or Soviet military districts) to the front area or personnel arriving to units from all sources, than in both cases the Soviet figure would be higher, but the ratio would not be 10:1 or 5:1, as might appear from your statements but something between 3:1 and 2:1. Which is close to the ratio of men mobilized during the war (or at least closer than 10:1), and this partly undermines the statement that the last ratio is unrepresentative.

If the Soviet force addition in 1943 had been no more than between 2 and 3 times larger than the German, it would have resulted in a dramatic drop in the strength of the Red Army. I'm sorry to be approximate again, but German replacements in the east in 1943 was somewhere between 1 and 1.5 million, with perhaps another half million or so in arriving units - altogether something a little bit below 2 million. While Red Army casualties amounted, if I remember correctly, to some 7 million combat losses alone. With 2-3 times the German level of force addition, this would have left something like 3-4 million uncovered losses (if sick are considered), which would have resulted in a drop in the strength of the operational fronts from roughly 6.5 million to about 2.5-3.5 million. Needless to say, no such thing happened. Hence, the Red Army must neccessarily have added a number of men to the operational fronts that exceeded the German addition by a good deal more than 2-3 times - otherwise there has to be something fundamentally wrong with either the Soviet casualty figures or the Soviet strength figures.

The same point is illustrated by the relation of the casualties. The Soviet losses were considerably more than 2-3 times larger than the German. Hence, if their force addition had been no more than 2-3 times larger, the force relation would have shifted in the German favor. And it didn't - on the contrary, it shifted in the Soviet favor, and quite notably too. This could only happen if the Soviet advantage in force addition was larger than the German advantage in casualties.

Finally, the fact that the ratio you suggest is close to the general ratio of men mobilised during the war is yet another indicator that it is problematic, because it ought not to be. For obvious reasons, a much smaller proportion of Germans mobilised during the course of the war fought on the Eastern front than was the case for the Soviet armed forces.

They year 1941 is a different story, to a large degree because the Soviet armed forces unlike German were not mobilized when the war started. And it wasn't any advantage, and what the greatest possible disadvantage.

Certainly, from nearly all perspectives. But not from the perspective of the availability of manpower reserves. Analysis neccessarily have tgo deal with real events, and the starting point was what it was. Relative to that point, the ability to mobilise large numbers of men quickly was an advantage. In any case, my point is not that it was better for the Red Army to mobilise men gradually rather than have them available from the outset, but just that the relatively un-mobilised state of the Red Army was an important reason why its force addition was so huge and quick in 1941-42, just like the highly mobilised state of Germany was the key reason why its force addition was so limited.

Let's take, for illustration, two sides: A and B. Side A has 2 men by the start of the war, side B - 1 men. During the year A additionally receives 0 men, side B - 1 men. If we look at this situation from the point of view of force addition that you favor so much, than it might appear that B has innumerable advantage. Simple common sense says otherwise: A deploys all its resources in a concentrated manner, while B commits its in packets. That just shows that excessive fetishization as you put it of one parameter could be in some way harmful.

Well, firstly your example is not analogous to the model I suggest. To make it so, you would have to tell us how many men each side had at the beginning and the end of the period, and how many casualties they incurred in between. From this we could then have inferred the level of force addition on each side, in the way that I have suggested.

Secondly, the entirely different model you describe above doesn't make any point at all, because it is incomplete. If we knew the losses, we could in theory determine from that what sort of force relation we ended up with, but we don't. As it is, we just have four isolated data points which do not enable any further conclusions by seeing them in conjunction, other than comparing the strength of both sides at one point and the level of their force addition over the period.

Thirdly, your example appears to, albeit in a flawed way, attempt to criticise my little model for failing to achieve something it does not try to achieve - namely establish a faultless general expression of everything that matters. What it does is, quite simply, to show how many men must have been added to the main operational formations in the East in a given period given what we know of their strength and casualties. Nothing more, nothing less. This is a valuable thing to establish, but there are of course countless other questions that need answering which this piece of information does not help us to answer, and which requires a different approach and other sources.

If I might attempt to rephrase the point I think you are trying to make, it would be something like this: 2+0 is at least as good as 1+1, which you miss with a model that sees only the force addition (hence, just 0 and 1). Well, nobody's arguing any different. Force addition naturally needs to be put into an overall analytical context just like everything else. I am simply pointing out a method that reliably and in a simple way lets you determine that Side A had 0 and Side B had 1, provided you have the strengths and the losses. Have you seen anyone argue that it's the only thing worth paying attention to, or that the implications of that are self-explanatory and irrespective of context?

Finally, while I am happy to discuss, I refuse to let the actual point involved get bogged down in a discussion of finer points which do not essentially affect it. The point was and remains:

1) that general comparisons of population do not in fact say anything meaningful about the number of men the states managed to commit to the campaign they fought against each other, and that this number was much larger on the side of the Soviet Union than on the German side.

2) That comparisons of strength also does not say anything meaningful about the commitment of manpower, given that one side consistently had to replace very much larger losses than the other, something that any accounting for manpower has to reflect.

Qvist wrote:What do you mean "after"? When was that exactly? The Wehrmacht did not reach that strength until it peaked in late 1943. And if that's what you're referring to, you haven't understood my point.

No, you haven't understood my point. I mean total mobilized during war

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Really? Not sure where I have that from actually, presumably Glantz or Tooze. I'll have to check, in the mean time consider the point suspended if you like. However, it's rather hard to see how it is possible to have a long period of general conscription for a large army like the USSR did without accumulating a considerable number of million men with military training.

General conscription were introduced only in september 1939. Earlier there were various restrictions for nonlabor elements. The quantity of recruits (active service from two years) also was limited to the size of armed forces.

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Ground forces / Air Force / Navy / Units out of norms

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There is no waste, there are reserves (Slogan of German Army in World Wars)

Qvist wrote: You don't think nearly 8 million trained reservists is a large number?

Up to 1938 in USSR were territorial system of training which mean that a conscript got three-months training during first service year and then during two years of service sometimes involved on training (some kind of National Guard in USA). For example in 1934 were 23 active rifle divisions, 19 mixed ones and 45 territorial. In 1937 (last year of such system) there were 70 active divisions and 28 territorial ones.

Overmans is not pertinent to this discussion, whatever the accuracy of his calculations (which I am afraid require rather more than your brief post in the thread llinked to to confirm).

May be you will make the observations there?

There is no waste, there are reserves (Slogan of German Army in World Wars)

Actually 51 during war but I agree it's very small number comparing with 1000+ German submarines.

only a few antiaircraft weapons (the Russian cities were not subject to air attacks,as the German ones )

If 11 705 85-mm AAG which were produced during 1941-44 is "a few"

Well,the production of LW Flakguns in 1944 was some 45000,but whatever,the Russian cities were not subject to,menaced by air attacks as the German cities,thus the SU had to spend less resources on the protection of its cities .

ljadw wrote:Well,the production of LW Flakguns in 1944 was some 45000,but whatever,the Russian cities were not subject to,menaced by air attacks as the German cities,thus the SU had to spend less resources on the protection of its cities .

Excuse me, but let to compare the comparable. ~21 thousands 8.8-12.8 cm Flak were produced in the same time.

There is no waste, there are reserves (Slogan of German Army in World Wars)